Chapter 2: The Truth of Personality
Do you know Andre Norman?
Andre grew up poor in a violent neighborhood where “getting out” was difficult. As a kid though, one teacher believed in Andre, and she got him to start playing the trumpet. The right goal sent Andre on the right path.
But then, Andre’s goal started drifting. He replaced playing music with hanging out with the cool kids.
Shortly later, he ended up in prison where his goal was to become the king. To become the king, he had to kill people. One day, as he was about to make his final act, he asked himself a question.
What was after becoming the king of the prison? Not much.
Andre’s actions had been motivated by his ultimate goal, and now that he saw the goal was not really…meaningful, he doubted his own actions.
That got Andre thinking.
He decided to change goals and got a new one: getting out of prison and into Harvard.
Long story short, he did get out of prison, and into Harvard, and now, he is an acclaimed speaker that teaches people how to reframe their goals to improve their lives.
Once Andre committed to a goal, nothing stopped him. As a result, he fulfilled it.
Questions
- Where is your life going right now?
- What wall is your ladder facing, and where will you be when you get to the “top”?
Your Goals Shape Your Identity
Everything you do is goal-driven. These goals shape your personality.
It becomes a problem when those goals are not actively chosen or defined.
Binge-watching YouTube has a purpose, even if it’s just to distract yourself.
How do you know whether you are on the right path?
You study yourself. More specifically, you study your actions.
Seeing every action you take as goal-driven allows you to take stock of the quality of your decision-making.
Questions
- Why are you engaging in this behavior?
- What is the purpose, reason, or end?
- What is the goal?
- How does this “goal” align with what you’re ultimately trying to do?
There Is a Reason for Everything you Do
How you spend your time matters. It reflects your goals.
Looking at what you’ve done the past twenty-four hours and then examining the reason for your behaviors will help you see what your goals are.
You will only be able to control your time and yourself when you truly determine what you want for yourself.
Your goals must be actively and consciously chosen, then pursued.
Spending your days on activities leading you to something incredibly important, something you truly value, is how you live without regret.
Questions
- Looking back at your list of activities from the past twenty-four hours, which ones are aligned with your future self?
- Which of those behaviors will your future self not engage in?
- Which of them, if removed, would free up more space and energy for what you ultimately want?
The Three Sources of All Goals
Personal confidence comes from making progress toward goals that are far bigger than your present capabilities. —Dan Sullivan
Goals come from three sources.
1. Exposure
Goals come from what you know. You can’t decide to go to Mars if you don’t know Mars exists.
Similarly, you can’t decide to become rich if you don’t know it is possible to become rich.
I started believing more in myself when I met people that had studied at Oxford and that weren’t any different than I was.
If I could get into Oxford, what else could I achieve?
2. Desire
You won’t pursue or engage in something if you don’t want it. But then, why do people do jobs they hate? Because they want the money. Neh. Actually, they want to pay the bills.
That’s their goal. Now, what if you changed the goal? What if you abandoned paying the bills, and chose a meaningful goal instead?
Just because you want something doesn’t mean you should want it. Our desires do not come from our innate personalities. Instead, our desires are trained, usually through experiences we’ve had, society, media, and those around us.
Often, your current desires—such as sleeping in, binge-watching Netflix, or staying up late with friends—contradict your future self’s desire, and are incompatible with better outcomes.
Now, desires can be trained. You can train yourself to want something.
When you evolve as a person, you develop a sense of purpose that expands beyond your personal preferences and interests. This purpose pushes you outside of your preferences and transforms who you are.
You train desire by actively and intentionally pursuing a goal. As was discussed in the previous chapter, passion follows engagement and skills.
Since you can learn to become passionate about anything, you might as well be intentional about what.
3. Confidence
You won’t pursue goals you don’t think you can achieve.
Your current goals reflect your current level of confidence
Your job and income level are based on your confidence. Your friends are based on your confidence.
How you dress is based on your confidence.
Confidence is the basis of imagination—which is required for seeing and choosing a future beyond your current capability and circumstances.
Confidence reflects your personal belief in what you can do, learn, and accomplish.
The greater your confidence, the bigger your future self.
The challenge of confidence is that it can easily be broken.
Confidence is fragile and erratic.
Negative experiences can wreck your confidence and imagination.
The good news is that confidence can be built, through courage, getting out of your comfort zone, and doing difficult things.
This is why you should have goals located outside of your comfort zone.
As you pursue these goals, you’ll have peak experiences.
Those peak experiences will make you more flexible as a person.
You will understand you are flexible and can change.
You will become more confident and capable to create and achieve even bigger goals.
You can build confidence in two ways:
- Through small and consistent actions outside of your comfort zone.
- Through bold one-time actions towards your future called a “power move”.
It can be quitting your job, investing in a mentor, going for a run in public, having an honest conversation, publishing a blog post even if you’re scared, asking for a raise.
The more power moves you make, the more peak experiences you have. The more peak experiences you have, the more flexible and confident you’ll become as a person.
The more flexible and confident you are, the more imaginative and exciting will be the future you create and pursue.
Identity Should Be Intentionally Designed, Based on Your Desired Future Self
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. —Albert Einstein
Most people let society define who they are.
Few people intentionally define and shape their identity based on who they want to be.
You need a vision, something meaningful to pursue because you won’t push past your perceived limits without visualizing your future self free of those limits.
Designing your future self requires imagining what their reality and daily experiences are like—the more vivid and detailed the better.
What are their freedoms, choices, circumstances, experiences, and daily behaviors?
When you become the driver of your own identity and focus on your future self, you care less about how you view yourself now.
What seems totally mind-blowing or exciting to you now is “normal life” for your future self.
Exercise: write the life of your future self. Be as specific as possible.
- What is your day-to-day life like?
- What do you stand for?
- How much money do you make?
- What type of clothes do you wear?
- How do you interact with other people?
- How do you view your present and future?
- What is your purpose?
- Where do you live? Who are your friends? What skills and talents do you have?
Select and Pursue One Major Goal: Your Future-Self Filter
To decide on your mission, simply look over all of your goals and then ask yourself: Which one of these goals would enable me to become the person I need to be to achieve everything else I want in my life. The answer to that question is your mission. —Hal Elrod
Now, choose one major goal. Having multiple goals is a reflection of fear and a lack of decision-making. Choose one goal. Just one.
This one goal must support all the others. Financial goals are often important because they sustain all of the other goals.
If you want to look better, earning more enables you to spend on better clothes, get a gym membership, and maybe even a personal trainer.
Choose one goal.
One goal creates focus. Focus creates momentum. Momentum and confidence spill over into all other areas of your life.
While reaching a goal is a process, process itself shouldn’t be your goal. That leads to mediocrity as it doesn’t give you any direction.
As Peter Thiel explains:
“Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular.”
Commit to Your One Major Goal: Why Results Matter
Your life reflects 100% of your commitments.
Whatever your life looks like now is what you were committed to. Your weight, your dating life, the money you earn.
If you were committed to something else, you’d have different results.
When you truly commit to the results you want, your life starts improving.
Your future self and the one major goal is what you should be committed to.
Everything you do needs to be filtered through that one major goal.
And that is hard.
Most people never even try to achieve their true desires because they are afraid to admit that it is what they truly want. They are afraid to fail.
When you commit to one specific outcome, however, that outcome must become your new narrative.
You don’t know how you will reach that goal, but you will.
That level of honesty and transparency is both rare and contagious—evoking confidence as you begin making progress.
Another reason to commit to specific results is that it clarifies your identity.
Your identity comes from your goals. Being totally bought in and clear about the end you have in mind instills a deep sense of purpose. You can imagine your future self in the position you want to be.
Questions
- Are you willing to commit to your future self?
- Are you willing to commit to one specific goal?
- Are you willing to put it all out on the line?
- Are you willing to be honest about what you truly want?
- Are you willing to refine and enhance your process to ensure improved results?
Go to Bed Earlier and Wake Up Earlier
The author goes out on a rant where he advises people to go to bed earlier and wake up earlier because you do better work in the morning while the night is usually the time of the day when you binge-consume products that do nothing for you.
Questions
- Are you going to create more peak experiences?
- Are you going to be more active and intentional with your time?
- Are you going to exercise more courage and commitment?
- Are you going to act toward your future self, become more flexible, and stop insisting that your former self is who you really are?
Embrace uncertainty
If there are meaningful choices, there is uncertainty. If there is no choice, there is no uncertainty. – Dr. Ellen Langer
If you’re unwilling to embrace uncertainty, then you are limiting who you are and who you could become.
Uncertainty is uncomfortable for our brain because it means risk, and risk means death.
However, if you want to accelerate your learning, you’ll need to embrace uncertainty. You’ll need to take risks and make mistakes. As you do, you’ll experience far more emotions—highs and lows—and through those experiences, you’ll change as a person.
Those are the very peak experiences you will have when you will be committed to your future self.
It may hurt a bit, but it will also become much more exciting and less repetitive.
Transform Yourself Daily Through Journaling
While most people think of journaling as writing about your past, you should use it to write about your future.
With the right ritual, your journaling sessions can become peak experiences, putting you into the best state of mind to live the rest of your day.
Here’s how to enter that state:
- Remove ALL distractions (phones, etc)
- Meditate or pray
- Review your vision or goals before writing (they should be written somewhere accessible. Don’t hesitate to change them as you move forward.)
- Write about things you’re grateful for—past, present, and future
- Start writing about your future goal
Don’t get attached to what you write about. Write with the expectation and excitement that your future self is real and that you will be successful.
Think in terms of what needs to be done to move forward. Write down all of the things you’ll need to do now and the people you’ll need to reach out to.
Conclusion of Chapter 2
The truth about personality is that it can and does change.
Your goals shape your identity. Your identity shapes your actions.
And your actions shape who you are and who you’re becoming.
This is how you can develop yourself and your personality.
Chapter 3: Transform Your Trauma
Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on—unchanged and immutable—as every new encounter or event is contaminated by the past. —Bessel van der Kolk
The author tells the story of Rosalie, a woman who never fulfilled her vision of writing children’s books.
When in her thirties, she took a drawing class to fulfill her dream. One day, the teacher was looking at everyone’s exercise and when he got to Rosalie’s, he took the brush and “corrected” her painting.
Rosalie never drew again after that incident. During the 60 seconds of being corrected, she internalized the belief that she wasn’t good at this, and that she would never become good at it.
Drawing and writing children’s books remained a distant dream.
That is the definition of trauma.
Trauma can be as simple as someone shaming, locking one up in a shelf for fun as a kid, or getting a degrading comment from a teacher.
In this chapter, you’ll learn how traumas influence our lives and actions.
Trauma Shatters Hope and Eliminates the Future
Let’s take math trauma as an example.
Math trauma manifests as anxiety or dread, and a strong fear of being wrong.
Most students develop a math trauma after a bad experience with math. They begin to think they aren’t good at math, and math which becomes part of that it will never change.
Next, they stop paying attention to math in the classroom and refuse to make efforts to learn it since “they are not good at it”.
The fear of math becomes part of their identity.
Pain and failure become associated with math. All imagination and interest in math fade. A “future” involving math no longer becomes possible.
That’s the principle behind trauma.
One of its features is that it stops you from being psychologically flexible.
The trauma creates a rule in your mind, you become rigid and fixed in your thinking.
One way to illustrate that is by measuring the imagination and creativity of people with PTSD.
They score zero.
Imagination is all about mental flexibility—seeing and believing different angles and possibilities, and the trauma simply prevent them from doing so.
When traumatized, you start thinking in black and white. Instead of seeing nuances, you focus exclusively on the event that happened.
You believe the experience you went through is systematic and objective instead of just being one bad experience among many others.
This creates a fixed mindset which according to Carole Dweck, is a mindset rooted in past experiences.
The opposite of a fixed mindset is what Dweck calls a “growth mindset,” a flexible mindset.
It is the belief that you can change your traits and character. Having a growth mindset means your life is defined by the future and focused on what can change.
Research on both trauma and the fixed mindset shows that they each individually lead to an exaggerated fear of failure to reach a desired goal.
Such failure would make too big of a mark on your identity, leaving you feeling like a total and utter failure.
Instead of even trying, they convince themselves to go for something easier and safe.
To quote Robert Brault, “we are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.”
The trauma leads us to become rigid about who we are and what we can do. Our past experiences now drive our future capabilities.
This is why making commitments about ourselves and our future should not be done while we’re in a traumatic or emotionally broken state.
From that state, our decisions for ourselves and our future will be limited. Instead, we want to make our decisions and commitments while in a peak and heightened state—when our faith and expectations are high.
Quick exercise
- Describe one negative or traumatic experience that you’ve had in your past.
- In what ways has this experience led you to pursue “lesser goals” or held you back in your progress in any way?
- Now reframe those negative experiences by writing how they could ultimately help you become a stronger person.
Personality as the By-Product of Trauma
Traumas are painful experiences—both in our past and future— that we haven’t processed and are avoiding.
Think of it as a spider web. It limits your capacity to move and decreases your strength.
We think that this incapacitated person is simply “who we are”. But it’s not. Who we are is our deepest-held aspirations, dreams, and goals.
Trauma is self-sustaining in the sense that it prevents us from facing our fear and our truth.
Rather than creating the life we want, we build the life around our traumas, enabling them to exist and take space.
Rather than becoming the person we want to become, we stay the person we are.
Rather than adapting our personality to match our goals, we adapt our goals to match our current and limited personality.
Questions
- How have negative experiences shaped you?
- Where do you have a fixed mindset?
- Where have you built your life around your traumas?
- What goals are you pursuing to avoid dealing with your trauma?
- How would your life be different if the trauma was gone?
- What life would you ideally choose for yourself?
- Who is your ideal future self, regardless of what you’ve been in the past or what has happened to you?
Moving Past Trauma
A refractory period is the amount of time it takes to emotionally recover and move on from an experience. Some events take minutes, some take hours, some take days. Some take months.
A trauma is an event whose the person who’s felt it did not go through a refractory period.
A way to decrease the refractory period is to be psychologically flexible, meaning, being in touch with your emotions, feel them, and express them as you go through them.
That’s how you can process them.
Being in touch means being aware, and that is different from being grounded. It’s about expressing your emotions BUT without completely absorbing them. You hold your thoughts and emotions loosely as you actively pursue meaningful goals.
The less you hold on to mistakes or painful experiences, the better you’re able to adapt to what the situation requires and perform in order to achieve your goals.
What happened in the past doesn’t impact the next thing you do, or stop you from being present.
The more psychologically flexible you are, the faster you can let things go.
When someone remains stuck in an emotional refractory period after a difficult experience, they literally get stuck in the memory and continue to experience life from the point of view they had when the event happened.
They stay imprisoned in an emotional and mental perspective.
Therefore, day after day, they continue reconstructing the emotions of the experience. They don’t regulate and reframe how they see and feel about the event. Trauma becomes a rut.
As the author Dr. Joe Dispenza states: “If you keep that refractory period going for weeks and months, you’ve developed a temperament. If you keep that same refractory period going on for years, it’s called a personality trait. When we begin to develop personality traits based on our emotions, we’re living in the past, and that’s where we get stuck. Teaching ourselves and our children to shorten the refractory period frees us to move through life without obstruction.”
Empathetic Witness: How to Transform Trauma
You’re only as sick as your secrets. —Alcoholics Anonymous
Trauma is only an interpretation of an event during which you felt painful emotions.
However, it doesn’t necessarily need to remain traumatic.
Although an initial reaction may be highly negative, all painful experiences can be reframed, reinterpreted, and ultimately used as growing experiences.
It is about changing your view on the experience. It’s about going from seeing it as happening to you, to seeing it as happening for you.
In order to transform the event from a traumatic experience to a “learning” experience and hence, a “positive” experience, you have to get rid of the pain you internalized.
You need to face your emotions and get them out by sharing them with other people.
By processing your experiences and emotions, by facing them, you change them. They become lighter.
Dr. Peter Levine, a renowned trauma researcher, said, “trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
The reason why traumas happen in the first place is that the more painful an experience is, the less we’ll talk about it, and the more we’ll internalize it.
This creates a fixed mindset. The past becomes a heavyweight we’d rather not think about.
The avoidance of pain creates addiction we use to numb ourselves to both the pain of the past and the pain of pursuing a desired future.
We get rid of the trauma when we feel the emotion attached to it and process it by expressing it to an empathetic witness.
As therapist Lynn Wilson said, “It is this honest connection between two human beings that, in the end, makes what we endured together understandable and meaningful.”
Family and friends being too busy, a psychotherapist is the one that now serves as an empathetic witness.
You need people who can help you get to your own next level. Otherwise, you’re going to hit some emotional experiences, bottle them up, and plateau or decline as a person.
Molehills can become mountains if you don’t have an empathetic witness to help you process and reframe your experiences.
A true empathetic witness encourages you to decide what you can do to move forward.
This demands courage.
Courage transforms trauma. Encouragement facilitates courage. Getting encouragement from others in your life helps you act courageously yourself.
This is why you need encouraging people in your life.
Quick Exercise
- List two or three people in your life who have been your biggest encouragers.
- How have they encouraged you?
- Why has it been so impactful?
- Reach out to them and openly thank them for their help in your life.
- A team of empathetic witnesses is people that listen to you express your feelings in a non-judgmental way which enables you to process them and move past them.
Questions
- Who are three important empathetic witnesses in your life right now?
- What other people could you add, or do you need, as empathetic witnesses?
- Who could you get on your team, right now, to help you get where you want to go?
- How much accountability and vulnerability do you currently have?
Becoming an Empathetic Witness to Those Around You
You can help others by being an empathetic witness to them.
When you listen to people in a loving and non-judgmental way, you enable your interlocutor to lift a burden, find clarity, process emotions and deal with their repressed feelings.
Being an empathetic witness is about listening and encouraging.
Not about talking. It can’t be done “quickly”.
You need to be there to listen, not solve the problem. The problem needs to be processed first, the emotion released, before any type of solutions can be discussed.
To make sure the event is processed entirely, the listener asks more questions.
- “Can you explain more for me?”
- “What do you mean by that?”
- “Why was that part so important?”
- “Have you given up on the idea of a better future?”
- “What positives have come from this?”
- “How will your future be different because of this?”
- “What can you do now to move forward?” “How can I help?”
Questions
- Are any of your relationships stuck in the past?
- Have former experiences created a fixed mindset in any of your relationships?
- Who are three people you could be an empathetic witness to, right now?
Conclusion
Trauma is at the core of who we are as people.
If we transform it, we remove the barriers it creates and can become unstoppable. If we don’t transform our trauma, we organize our lives around them, which decreases our capacity to get out of our comfort zone and achieve great purposes.
A cornerstone of trauma is that it is isolated, internalized, and then avoided.
The initial emotional reaction—which is negative, painful, and paralyzing—becomes the filter through which the memory is stored, hence the need to release it.
Healthy memories change over time. A growing person continually has a changing past, expanding in meaning and usefulness.
If you wish to move on from painful experiences, you can’t avoid them but have to face them, feel them, and release them.
Writing down and organizing your thoughts and emotions in your journal is an excellent way to do that.
It helps you get your feelings out of your mind and process them so that the memory can become lighter…or even completely forgotten.
